Survival and Trials of Revival: Psychodynamic Studies of Holocaust Survivors and Their Families in Israel and the Diaspora

This book offers psychodynamic studies of Holocaust survivors and their families in Israel and the Diaspora. It is a moving account of the desperate struggles of these survivors to overcome their horrendous experiences in the ghettos and concentration camps and their subsequent attempts to revive their lives after the war. Klein was himself such a survivor; as a psychoanalyst, he later interviewed survivors in Israel and the United States and evaluated the consequences of the Holocaust and its aftermath from a psychoanalytic point of view. These interviews, together with his own memories, provide the book with a special depth.

Hillel Klein was born in Krakow on 20 March 1923. He was 16 years old when the Germans marched into Poland. After a few months he joined the resistance and went underground. In 1942 he was captured by the Germans and locked up. He survived the horrors of several camps and ended up in Theresienstadt, where he was liberated by the Red Army at the age of 22. He subsequently studied medicine and became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, practicing in Jerusalem. He died at the end of 1985.

It is with much satisfaction that we publish Hillel Klein’s Survival and Trials of Revival: Psychodynamic Studies of Holocaust Survivors and Their Families in Israel and the Diaspora as the first book of our new series. Hillel Klein, himself a Holocaust survivor, was a pioneer psychoanalyst investigator of Holocaust survivors and their families. His reconceptualization of the experience of guilt as a positive rather than a pathological emotion was a vitally important contribution that has implications far beyond the role of “survivor guilt. “ Klein’s own life and work, and his legacy as expressed in this book, ably edited by Alex Holder, serve as a model for the rich intersection of psychoanalysis and Jewish life.

— Lewis Aron, New York University, "Psychoanalysis and Jewish Life" Series Editor